tonyh: Working fine for me...

pauloaguia: What say you?

tonyh: that I'm not experincing slowness and neither "Website not found" messages.
Of course, I posted my message 2 whole minutes after yours. Maybe Fencer was updating the site however. It usually gets offline for about a minute when he does that...

pauloaguia: It's been like this for weeks!!

tonyh: Same for me for the last two weeks. I play very few games due to the long wait for pages to load. I keep getting the same message when I ask, there is nothing wrong with the site. I dont get why it works great for some and horrible for others. NO matter where they are located in the world!
Frusterating to say the least.
I thought it was my machine but other sites work great. I checked my net connection, my router, my modem, different browsers, this and that.. All other sites I go to work ok.. Why BK works sooo bad for me but not for others stumps the heck outta me..

Rose: Oh but it does work badly for others. My webtv is like a nightmare. It takes 5 minutes to get on any discussion board and then when you get there you see something brilliant like LOL. Hardly worth it at times.

Purple: The short moments when the site works good are easy to count but  Fencer continue to swipe that problem under the carpet :(

Purple: Oh I know.. Im avoiding most public boards due to the long load time.. Every page takes up to 55 seconds to load.. then youre in purgatory if you get doubles in gammon. That is a 5 min turn for sure.. Im just glad to hear Im not alone. I thought I was going mad.
But what does a person do when told there is nothing wrong with the site, the server that it is on or the connection speeds?

Rose: If your main problems are on discussion board pages, or pages where it is time to submit your move, (Basically any page where the text box shows up), I highly reccomend going to "Change Smileys" and emptying them out. I found that the more recent smiley additions must have "huge" smileys. (I'm talking about when the batch including the smiley was added). After I emptied it out completely, all pages where the text box shows up loaded at their normal speed of 3 to 4 seconds! I then gradually started adding smilies, and sort of found out which ones were slowing things down.

Shutting off smilies in Settings was NOT enough.

I was so frustrated for weeks. MOST brainking pages were loading in 2-4 seconds, EXCEPT any page that included the text box. Those were taking 15-20 seconds! (And I have DSL)

It's worth a try anyways! It worked for me! (I now only have about 10 smilies in my "change smiley" area.)

rod03801: Where do you find 'Change Smilies', please?

tonyh: Above the text boxes. (Next to "Change message area size")

Click it and it takes you to a Settings page. Scroll down. Near the bottom you will need to put a check mark in "Activate User Smilies"

I only have about 10 smilies now that load each time a text box shows up. (You know? When you click on the "Smiley" above the text box, the ones that show up that you can just click on to have them appear in the text box)

I have DSL. When the newer batches of smilies were added a couple months ago, any page with a text box started taking 15-20 seconds to load! (As opposed to 2-3 seconds for most other Brainking pages)

After I emptied it, I added back in my most frequently used smilies. The ones that I found that slowed things down most significantly were the tip-toeing smiley, and the newer blue smiley that bounces back and forth. (I didn't go much further than that in my experimentation)

Oh, and to repeat, going to Javascript and de-activating smilies there DID NOT help.(That was the first thing I tried) I had to do it the way I described.

LOL, and one more thing, I personally found that Rich text Editor slowed things down a bit too.

rod03801: Done the smileys bit - and it seems better.

tonyh:
try playing the site as a pawn by turning everything of in java script and you be amazed on how much it speeds up

I wrote this back in March, and doing these things helped me a lot with the speed of the site:

Computers (coan.net, 2007-03-12 20:16:01)

Play with the different settings - find out what works best for you.

coan.net: I still think that an average player prefer a site where he doesnt need to spend most of the time "testing changes" to make the site move a tiny bit  faster.  

Andersp:
I agree this is supposed to be a game site simple as that, and the speed to play games on this site is just awful lately, I usually just give up now, and all other sites work super fast so its not my connection or my computer

beach: Same here, it's frustrating with fisher clock games ... whereas i used to play a few hours before if i was busy i'm now forced to play at least a day or two before so i know they're ok .. only been bad for about 5 days here, but i'm the same as you and give up after 10-15 games.

Andersp: Oh, I also agree - but there is little that we can do since apparently it is not the site, but many many many users problems.

But a long time request that I would still love to see - a very very basic all-features striped off version of BrainKing - that is when playing a game, all the comes up is the game - none of the unnecessary things loading on the page. Yea yea yea... all those unnecessary things suppose to only take 1/24th of a second to load.... but something slows things down.

rod03801: I turned off all smiley's.. so they don't load at all .. no change..

Rose: Check with different browsers. For instance, nowadays IE7 only displays a page after it was completely loaded - larger pages, like Boards with 100 messages, will simply take longer to display. Check if changing browser helps at all.
Also, it it's happening to some players and not others, then it may be because of their BK's configurations. There's loads of things you can enable or disable and some of them do have an impact on performance, no matter if Fencer syas the site is working great or not. I remember coan posted something about it some time ago. For instance, I have most of the game comboboxes disabled, only display 5 messages per page on boards, have no context menu, smilies popup disabled, etc.
But if if you try and disable certain features, and reduce the load per page, and see that the site starts getting faster then post it here - it will help others know what to disable and help Fencer know he has to optimize that feature...

Fencer - anych chance we could have different configuration profiles? That way I could simply choose a profile to use at home and another to use when I'm on a wireless connection with less bandwith.
It could also help on testing different configuration profiles - I'd change all settings with one click and could immediately see if it had any impact on the site's performance at all...

pauloaguia: Mmmmm. Interesting idea. But it could be done.

Fencer:  Why waste time by making options for the "know how guys"?  Normal players dont care about configuration profiles, changing smileys and so on, they want an easy accessable site where they can PLAY GAMES!